If Being began, it must have arisen either from Being or
from not-being. But for Being to arise out of Being, that
is not a beginning, and for Being to arise out of not-being
is impossible, since there is then no reason why it should
arise later rather than sooner. Being cannot come out of
not-being, nor something out of nothing.Ex nihilo nihil fit.
This is the fundamental thought of Parmenides. Moreover,
we cannot say of Being that it was, that it is, that it will
be. There is for it no past, no present, and no future. It
is rather eternally and timelessly present. It is undivided
and indivisible. For anything to be divided {45} it must
be divided by something other than itself. But there is
nothing other than Being; there is no not-being. Therefore
there is nothing by which Being can be divided. Hence it
is indivisible. It is unmoved and undisturbed, for motion
and disturbance are forms of becoming, and all becoming is
excluded from Being. It is absolutely self-identical. It does
not arise from anything other than itself. It does not pass
into anything other than itself. It has its whole being in
itself. It does not depend upon anything else for its being
and reality. It does not pass over into otherness; it remains,
steadfast, and abiding in itself. Of positive character Being
has nothing. Its sole character is simply its being. It cannot
be said that it is this or that; it cannot be said that it has
this or that quality, that it is here or there, then or now.
It simplyis. Its only quality is, so to speak, “isness.”
But in Parmenides there emerges for the first time a distinc-
tion of fundamental importance in philosophy, the distinc-
tion between Sense and Reason. The world of falsity and
appearance, of becoming, of not-being, this is, says Par-
menides, the world which is presented to us by the senses.
True and veritable Being is known to us only by reason,
by thought. The senses therefore, are, for Parmenides, the
sources of all illusion and error. Truth lies only in reason.
This is exceedingly important, because this,that truth lies
in reason and not in the world of sense, is the fundamental
position of idealism.The doctrine of Being, just described, occupies the first part
of the poem of Parmenides. The second part is the way
of false opinion. But whether Parmenides is here simply
giving an account of the false philosophies {46} of his day,
(and in doing this there does not seem much point,) or
whether he was, with total inconsistency, attempting, in a
cosmological theory of his own, to explain the origin of that
world of appearance and illusion, whose very being he has,
in the first part of the poem, denied—this does not seem to
be clear. The theory here propounded, at any rate, is that
the sense-world is composed of the two opposites, the hot
and the cold, or light and darkness. The more hot there
is, the more life, the more reality; the more cold, the more
unreality and death.What position, now, are we to assign to Parmenides in phi-
losophy? How are we to characterize his system? Such
writers as Hegel, Erdmann, and Schwegler, have always in-
terpreted his philosophy in an idealistic sense. Professor
Burnet, however, takes the opposite view. To quote his
own words: “Parmenides is not, as some have said, the fa-
ther of idealism. On the contrary, all materialism depends
upon his view.” [Footnote 5] Now if we cannot say whether
Parmenides was a materialist or an idealist, we cannot be